Canva just raised $15m without even touching the funds from its last round

Photo credit: Canva.

Raising capital, a perennial challenge for most growing companies, is one problem Australian graphic design startup Canva doesn’t have right now. The company just announced it has raised a new round of funding worth US$15 million.

Canva thinks of its product as a collaboration tool for the modern, connected workplace.

The cash comes from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures, from Australia and Silicon Valley respectively. This round values the company at US$345 million, up from its US$165 million at the time of its series A in October 2015.

The startup says it hasn’t spent any of the funds from that round, where it raised US$15 million.

Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins tells Tech in Asia the company was very happy working with its investors and the people and networks they were able to connect them to – which is why it was happy to raise more capital from them.

In particular, Felicis managing director Wesley Chan (former partner at Google Ventures and best known as the creator of Google Analytics) shared a lot of his valuable experience with the startup, Melanie says.

“It’s always good to have more capital than you urgently need, so it’s been very helpful to gear up Canva up for a lot of future success,” she adds.

Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. Photo credit: Canva.

Aiming for the workplace

Canva has created a software suite of tools that enables users to produce their own graphic designs for social media, presentations, and so on. It offers a free consumer version and a paid service called Canva for Work.

The startup thinks of its product as being close to the likes of Slack, Dropbox, and Trello – a collaboration tool for the modern, connected workplace. “It’s pretty much taking everything that’s been in Microsoft Office and giving it a really strong visual slant,” Melanie explains.

So instead of the designers in an organization creating works that need to go through a lot of back and forth with feedback and changes, the team can create templates that other departments, like sales and marketing, can then edit as needed.

“There’s a lot to do to make Canva the place that powers the modern workforce, that everyone turns to to create designs and content that they previously couldn’t,” Melanie says. “Visual literacy is going to become very important across every profession in the future.”

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